Logging Guidelines for Overnight PCBA Burn-In Testing of Embedded Boards

The article explains how software should record evidence during PCBA burn-in, a screening process where hardware runs for an extended period to expose latent defects. It argues that a board can appear healthy while its application has silently restarted or stalled, so logs must reveal such interruptions. The author recommends a repeatable test workload covering storage, display, and network paths, with verified results rather than only completed-operation counters. External collectors, monotonic and wall-clock timestamps, and heartbeats carrying progress details are suggested to preserve evidence across power loss or application failure. The piece also cautions that automatic recovery should remain visible in the test record.